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SILICON CHIP www.siliconchip.com.au Publisher & Editor-in-Chief Leo Simpson, B.Bus., FAICD Production Manager Greg Swain, B.Sc. (Hons.) Technical Editor John Clarke, B.E.(Elec.) Technical Staff Ross Tester Jim Rowe, B.A., B.Sc Nicholas Vinen Photography Ross Tester Reader Services Ann Morris Advertising Enquiries Glyn Smith Phone (02) 9939 3295 Mobile 0431 792 293 glyn<at>siliconchip.com.au Regular Contributors Brendan Akhurst Rodney Champness, VK3UG Kevin Poulter Stan Swan Dave Thompson SILICON CHIP is published 12 times a year by Silicon Chip Publications Pty Ltd. ACN 003 205 490. ABN 49 003 205 490. All material is copyright ©. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the written consent of the publisher. Printing: Hannanprint, Noble Park, Victoria. Distribution: Network Distribution Company. Subscription rates: $105.00 per year in Australia. For overseas rates, see our website or the subscriptions page in this issue. Editorial office: Unit 1, 234 Harbord Rd, Brookvale, NSW 2100. Postal address: PO Box 139, Collaroy Beach, NSW 2097. Phone (02) 9939 3295. Fax (02) 9939 2648. E-mail: silicon<at>siliconchip.com.au ISSN 1030-2662 Recommended and maximum price only. 2  Silicon Chip Publisher’s Letter Parcel deliveries by octocopter may be some time off Just as this issue was going to press there was an announcement that Amazon.com is working on drones for same-day parcel delivery. Just a few days later, there was a similar announcement from Australian company Zookal which offers a service providing secondhand text books to university students. My first reaction to the announcements was “Yeah, right! That’s not going to happen, any time soon.” The basic concept is to use octocopters very similar to those featured in our August 2012 issue. Those machines can lift loads of a few kilograms and Amazon.com envisions them being used to make quick deliveries within 10 miles (16km) of their warehouses. And it is perfectly feasible for a drone octocopter to make such a journey. It would only need GPS locations for a few way-points programmed into it and off it would go. Of course, each time it comes back to base, its battery pack would need to be charged, its way-points changed and off it would go again. But it’s not any lack of technical feasibility which will stop this idea. No, it is the sheer number of drones which would be required to even make a fraction of the deliveries that would be made on any day from a large-scale on-line retailer. For a typical fulfilment centre, it would require many hundreds of drones to make even a reasonable dint in the number of deliveries every day. That would mean huge numbers of battery packs always being on charge and so on. There is also the major problem of making sure that the delivery actually gets to the customer and proving it did. How does the customer sign a delivery docket? And while Amazon has stated that these drones won’t carry cameras because of privacy concerns, you can bet that cameras will need to be used to prove that delivery has occurred. But those are minor problems compared to the possibility of success. Suppose it really was practical for parcel delivery. Can you imagine huge numbers of these octocopters buzzing around a warehouse, like bees to a hive? And if Amazon did it successfully that means that all large courier companies would want to get into the act so we would have literally thousands of drones buzzing around. If you think that aviation authorities have enough problems with the coordination of hundreds or thousands of flights of full-size aircraft over our cities, how would they cope with octocopters flying in the same air space? But the same problems of flight and route control would also have to be handled by the courier companies. There is no way that our Civil Aviation Authority or the United States’ Federal Aviation Authority is going to let that happen. In any case, a drone carrying a single parcel for each round trip does not seem like a good concept, logistically. For half the trip it won’t be carrying anything. By contrast, any courier vehicle probably carries dozens or even hundreds of parcels and has a carefully mapped out course to make the journey as efficient as possible. Of course, one can well understand the motivation for Amazon or any courier company wanting to use the latest technology to provide quick deliveries to customers. The huge number of on-line sales from internet retailers now means the normal delivery methods are being overwhelmed. Fulfilment companies are looking for any method which will give them an edge in improving their delivery times. No doubt technology will assist deliveries but I don’t think drones are going to be a major part of that scenario. It was a nice bit of publicity for Amazon. com though. By Leo Simpson siliconchip.com.au